It's worse than simply who provides computers to schools. Big companies, like Pearson, see dollar signs when it comes to schools. They write curriculum for the schools to use (using Pearson textbooks, of course) and tests to make sure that the students are learning the Pearson lessons the right way. Of course, passing students don't have more monetary possibilities, so they make the tests to show that the kids are failing. This way they can sell courses to the teachers/administrators, more textbooks, etc.
Meanwhile, Charter schools run by businesses are popping up all over. These schools get to pick and choose which students they allow in but take public school money. This leaves the public schools with less funding and a higher percentage of high-needs students which, in turn, leads to calls that the public schools are failing and need to be replaced. The Charter schools aren't non-profit entities, though, so some of that public school money (your tax dollars) goes into the pockets of the businesses that run the charter schools.
Sadly, my state's governor - Andrew Cuomo - has made it clear he would love to replace all public schools with Charter schools. I guess public schools don't donate enough to re-election campaigns.
I loaded XKCD late in the game an thus missed some of his humorous updates regarding the landing. Luckily, XKCD1446.org has compiled all of them and you can flip through them from the first (blank) image to the most recent.
I almost snapped once in high school too. (Let's just say that "seeing red" can, in fact, be literal.)
As a parent, I was once told by a principal - after my son was attacked by another child and sent to the nurse - that 1) nobody saw the incident, then 2) my son started it (by raising his hands to protect his personal space when the kid jumped in front of him), and then 3) that my son is "not the type of kid to be bullied" (her exact words). We yanked our kid out of that school and went to the superintendent immediately. He went to another school and thrived. Sadly, too many administrators think that they can have "no bullying problem" by ignoring any bullying issues and/or blaming the victim until they be quiet.
I was tormented on a daily basis by a group of kids when I was in high school. Fighting back wasn't an option (there were enough that they could overpower me). Avoiding them wasn't an option (they would just follow me and taunt me for trying to avoid them). So I just took the abuse day after day after day. I began to get paranoid that anyone laughing was directly laughing at me. It took me years to recover (in some ways, I've never recovered).
When I see reports of kids taking their lives or going on a rampage due to bullying, I think that the story could have been about me had things gone slightly differently one way or another.
At the time, I didn't think I had any option to talk to anyone about my mental health. I was lucky to have a friend who spoke with my bullies and got them to stop. (They thought it was just harmless fun they were having.) Many aren't as lucky.
This is a natural consequence of random changes to personal and social preferences over time. You grow up with the particular set of preferences that is accepted by the majority and they become your norm. Over time the preferences in society change and the majority opinion changes so you naturally move from being in the majority to the minority. What was once the accepted majority view becomes a minority view and your opinons become out of step with the rest of society. The older you get, the more this happens and the more you feel out of touch with the "modern" world.
Grandpa Simpson put it best: "I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me, and it'll happen to you, too!"
I don't think Congress could zero out the FCC's budget without severe repercussions.
This isn't to say that Congress WOULDN'T do this. Many politicians seem to be of the opinion "we will oppose the other party's efforts even if it means destroying the government and people's lives in the process." I almost would like to see them try this only to have it massively blow up in their face.
I was going to argue that the Amazon VOD isn't that expensive - at $1.99 per episode - but then I noticed that Game of Thrones is $2.99 per episode for SD and $3.99 per episode for HD. Buying the whole season (10 episodes) saves you a whopping $0.91. So it might be an option if you don't want to subscribe to HBO via a cable provider JUST for Foundation and if HBO's standalone service (when it comes) isn't priced at a less expensive rate.
It's been years since I read the original books. (I should definitely go back and re-read them.) Wasn't each book/story set in a different time period? You had the introduction with Hari coming up with Psychohistory, then various stories involving the Foundation (actually First Foundation though we don't learn of the Second Foundation until later). Each story takes place years, if not decades later often with an entirely different cast of characters.
It will be interesting to see how they handle this. Will each book be a season? Will there be an all-new cast each season (or whenever they jump books)? Or will they condense the time period jumps and different characters into one long story involving the same characters?
Not only that, but many HBO shows are available via Amazon VOD. It looks like it is one season behind (in the case of Game of Thrones, at least), but you could still catch up with the Foundation series without subscribing to HBO/Cable TV.
I somehow worry less about them butchering the story with it as a HBO series than I would were they going to turn it into a movie (or even a series of movies). In the latter case, Michael Bay would probably get hired to direct, Hari Seldon would turn into a buff action star out to save the galaxy along with his scantily clad female assistant, and things would explode (utilizing the latest in CGI explosion technology) just by people looking at them.
So you've got servers hosting potentially sensitive data. Ordinarily, physical access to these boxes would be restricted to the people with data center access. Now will it be RANDOM_OFFICE_WORKER in RANDOM_COMPANY? Sure, you might have the servers password protected, but physical access to the boxes trumps nearly any other kind of security. This sounds to me like it is just a matter of time before some kind of massive data leak occurs thanks to hosting the servers outside of a secured data center.
1) The government imposes a "Don't Talk About X" order and punishes everyone who talks about X. This method is popular in places like China.
2) A small group of people on the Internet decide "We don't want anyone talking about X" and threatens/harasses anyone who talks about X. This leads to people either not talking about X or being forced offline due to the threats.
Right now, many people are experiencing censorship type #2. Note: This doesn't mean you can't disagree with someone online. Saying "I disagree with you and here is why..." is a lot different than saying "So-And-So is a **** and should be killed. They live at $FULL_ADDRESS." The former lays out your reasons for disagreeing. The latter is simply a threat of violence for daring to disagree. If you don't agree with the people who are being threatened, go ahead and state your reasons why. But don't think it is your right to threaten someone with violence. (Yes, I saw someone post that it was their right to threaten someone with death for disagreeing with them.)
As far as this being the work of "trolls", classic trolls would post something inflammatory and then would sit back and watch the firestorm erupt. A troll in Slashdot might post "Windows is better than Linux in every way" and wait for the Linux fans to respond. These people aren't engaging in "classic trolling" but in a new form of trolling which is better termed as simply harassment. They will follow people from site to site and will threaten to move the harassment from online to real life. (Showing up at conferences, calling the person, or posting the person's home address and threatening to go there.) These people shouldn't just be written off as harmless trolls, but should be treated as people engaging in criminal harassment.
My wife has experienced this too. Especially when it comes to repairmen talking to her like she's an idiot that doesn't understand anything or doesn't know when she's being served a heaping portion of BS. Then, I walk in the room and they suddenly act friendly and helpful as if I understand everything about car repair or air conditioning systems all instinctively due to the presence of my Y chromosome.
Luckily, I think she has escaped the most demeaning aspects of sexism (catcalling and other explicit sexual references), but she shouldn't be treated as if she is "less than" me just because I'm a man and she's a woman.
I take it personally when a woman is attacked by a man just for being a woman - but not because I want to claim it's an isolated case or because I want to try claiming "men have it worse." Simply put: I've spent my entire life being a nice guy. It's just not in my nature to be mean. If I'm unintentionally mean to someone, I'll feel horrible about it for weeks (if not longer). Now here comes some low-life poor-excuse-for-a-man who is tarnishing my entire gender simply because they can't keep their misogyny to themselves.
So beyond the obvious "don't like seeing anyone being harassed just for speaking their mind", I take offense because people like this ruin my reputation as a man just because they happen to be of the same gender.
I thought they needed to submit it to the Elders of the Internet. They can be reached in their offices atop Big Ben where they currently guard The Internet. (No, they won't lend it out to you. The last time they did that, it didn't work out so well.)
They have the "ability" to cheat. Being "able" to do something does not make it a "right".
Exactly. There's a lot that people have the ability to do every day though they refrain from doing so. You could walk down the street and just decide to punch everyone in the nose. That's within your ability, but most people don't do this. (Mainly because they would get in trouble for doing so and/or would encounter someone who would punch back.) You also have the ability to walk down the street handing $1 bills to everyone you meet. Again, most people don't do this (as you might quickly run out of money to give out). Sadly, too many people confuse "can do X" with "it is my right to do X."
I really only encountered two teachers who both inspired me to think and rewarded me for it when I did.
I had a few teachers like this. Unfortunately, my kids' school system seems to be geared towards giving teachers scripts that they NEED to follow (thanks, EngageNY!) and any deviation will be punished. Punishment is via standardized testing tied to teacher jobs. If the kids don't do well, the teacher is punished. This all but forces the teacher to devote all possible time on test preparation. Furthermore, kids who get the right answer, but not via the required method, are marked as wrong. The message to kids: Get in that box and stay in there. No wandering out for anything!
(Sadly, we can't afford private school so we're fighting against this system as much as we can while helping out kids break out of the box in other ways. Need to keep their creative intelligence alive somehow.)
In our day when we did a stupid thing, only a small group of people knew about it.
Today, when a kid does a stupid thing, a photo/video/post/etc can be shared with the world showing people all over the planet just how stupid this kid was.
Does everyone in the world care what stupid thing RANDOM_KID does? Of course not, but the fact that the Internet spreads this out there so widely can make what normally would have been a "your friends joke about it for a week" incident into total strangers commenting on how dumb you are.
(Sadly, many kids don't know one rule I learned that made me much happier: Take all positive comments you can from anyone, but only take negative comments from a trusted group of people [friends, family, co-workers, etc]. Ignore all other negative comments.)
Same here. I remember trying to get my first job in high school. I went for the interview and didn't have a resume or anything. I was accepted right away. All I needed to do was buy a couple hundred dollars worth of knives and then go door-to-door selling them. The guy who was jumping to hire me all but promised that I'd make tons of money. My parents refused to allow me to take the job and I remember at the time yelling about how unfair they were and how they didn't know anything. Now, I look back and cringe about how naive young-me was and am thankful that my parents were protecting enough to not have me spend hundreds of dollars (that I likely didn't have) on a "job" that would have just fleeced me for what little I was worth.
Others have countered more of your points, but I just wanted to address this one:
Residential broadband networks were never engineered as video delivery systems.
The Internet in general wasn't formed with video delivery in mind. Does this mean that nobody should ever distribute video over the Internet and expect it to work? Of course not. Times change and the use case for the Internet - and residential broadband networks - change as well. Most of the problems with distributing videos across residential networks seem to be caused by the ISPs who don't want to invest in infrastructure improvements, but want to keep taking users' money. Add in that these ISPs are usually monopolies/duopolies and the market can't "fix" this situation.
There are actually two problems at play here - with one common reason. The first is that the backbone ISPs are purposefully allowing their peering connections to saturate to hurt video companies like Netflix. The second is that last mile ISPs want to charge certain companies (e.g. video companies like Netflix) extra for the "privilege" of not having their packet delivery slowed to a crawl.
The reason for both of these is that these ISPs also - for the most part - offer cable TV services. They don't want upstarts like Netflix taking money away from their cable TV revenue so they are trying every trick they can to prevent people from using Netflix. (This includes setting bandwidth caps and charging overage fees.) Given that these ISPs also tend to be monopolies (or duopolies) in their areas, these actions *should* result in anti-trust investigations. Unfortunately, enough lobbying money has been spread around to keep anti-trust proceedings from starting.
Sadly, I've known people like this. They confuse what they want to do with what God wants them to do. So if they want to harass someone, it is God's will. If they want to pry into someone's personal life, it is really God's will that they do so. Everything they do is God's will and since God's will can't be questioned, they can't be questioned.
Why couldn't you have some sort of random audit the way restaurants are subject to random health inspections?
The stripper inspector arrives, flashes his badge, immediately sees all of the girls performing that night - double-checking to make sure they are of age - and perhaps makes sure other requirements are in order (e.g. liquor license is up to date, nothing illegal going on in the back rooms if you slip the girls some extra cash, etc).
Would this be a 100% effective solution to underage dancers? Of course not. But neither are health inspections a 100% effective means of keeping restaurants clean. You'll still get eateries where the chefs use the restroom and then walk out without washing their hands. It would be less prone to abuse, though, than a centrally located licensing facility with records that could be opened via an information request.
As an added bonus, imagine the line of candidates that would form for the position of Official Stripper Inspector.
Copyright originated as a balance between the needs of the creator (at the time, usually a writer) to have a monopoly on their work so as to make money from said work (and not have random publishers spitting out knock off copies without compensating the author) and the needs of the public to build on the works.
Patents came to be out of a desire to build upon others' works. The alternative to patents are trade secrets and, at one time, every industry was run by a guild that viciously protected their secrets. If you wanted to break into that industry (or build on what they were doing), you needed to know these secrets and you couldn't know that unless the guild allowed you to know. With patents, companies could "own" a technique/technology for a limited time in exchange for the knowledge being made public and being freely available when the patent expired.
The abuse of copyrights was primarily due to their length. In the original form at the time of the USA's founding, copyright length was 14 years plus a one-time 14 year renewal. Nowadays, they can be 120 years long. Patents, meanwhile, were abused by being applied to anything and everything. Performing a common task but with a computer? Patent it. Add in a patent office with a "approve it all and let the courts sort it out" combined with courts with a "if the patent office approved it, assume it is valid", and it is easy to see why this was messed up.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worse than simply who provides computers to schools. Big companies, like Pearson, see dollar signs when it comes to schools. They write curriculum for the schools to use (using Pearson textbooks, of course) and tests to make sure that the students are learning the Pearson lessons the right way. Of course, passing students don't have more monetary possibilities, so they make the tests to show that the kids are failing. This way they can sell courses to the teachers/administrators, more textbooks, etc.
Meanwhile, Charter schools run by businesses are popping up all over. These schools get to pick and choose which students they allow in but take public school money. This leaves the public schools with less funding and a higher percentage of high-needs students which, in turn, leads to calls that the public schools are failing and need to be replaced. The Charter schools aren't non-profit entities, though, so some of that public school money (your tax dollars) goes into the pockets of the businesses that run the charter schools.
Sadly, my state's governor - Andrew Cuomo - has made it clear he would love to replace all public schools with Charter schools. I guess public schools don't donate enough to re-election campaigns.
I loaded XKCD late in the game an thus missed some of his humorous updates regarding the landing. Luckily, XKCD1446.org has compiled all of them and you can flip through them from the first (blank) image to the most recent.
I almost snapped once in high school too. (Let's just say that "seeing red" can, in fact, be literal.)
As a parent, I was once told by a principal - after my son was attacked by another child and sent to the nurse - that 1) nobody saw the incident, then 2) my son started it (by raising his hands to protect his personal space when the kid jumped in front of him), and then 3) that my son is "not the type of kid to be bullied" (her exact words). We yanked our kid out of that school and went to the superintendent immediately. He went to another school and thrived. Sadly, too many administrators think that they can have "no bullying problem" by ignoring any bullying issues and/or blaming the victim until they be quiet.
As the parent of a kid who plays the drums, I can attest to them being extremely loud. Not sure if they are gunshot-loud, but it wouldn't surprise me.
I was tormented on a daily basis by a group of kids when I was in high school. Fighting back wasn't an option (there were enough that they could overpower me). Avoiding them wasn't an option (they would just follow me and taunt me for trying to avoid them). So I just took the abuse day after day after day. I began to get paranoid that anyone laughing was directly laughing at me. It took me years to recover (in some ways, I've never recovered).
When I see reports of kids taking their lives or going on a rampage due to bullying, I think that the story could have been about me had things gone slightly differently one way or another.
At the time, I didn't think I had any option to talk to anyone about my mental health. I was lucky to have a friend who spoke with my bullies and got them to stop. (They thought it was just harmless fun they were having.) Many aren't as lucky.
Grandpa Simpson put it best: "I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me, and it'll happen to you, too!"
I don't think Congress could zero out the FCC's budget without severe repercussions.
This isn't to say that Congress WOULDN'T do this. Many politicians seem to be of the opinion "we will oppose the other party's efforts even if it means destroying the government and people's lives in the process." I almost would like to see them try this only to have it massively blow up in their face.
I was going to argue that the Amazon VOD isn't that expensive - at $1.99 per episode - but then I noticed that Game of Thrones is $2.99 per episode for SD and $3.99 per episode for HD. Buying the whole season (10 episodes) saves you a whopping $0.91. So it might be an option if you don't want to subscribe to HBO via a cable provider JUST for Foundation and if HBO's standalone service (when it comes) isn't priced at a less expensive rate.
It's been years since I read the original books. (I should definitely go back and re-read them.) Wasn't each book/story set in a different time period? You had the introduction with Hari coming up with Psychohistory, then various stories involving the Foundation (actually First Foundation though we don't learn of the Second Foundation until later). Each story takes place years, if not decades later often with an entirely different cast of characters.
It will be interesting to see how they handle this. Will each book be a season? Will there be an all-new cast each season (or whenever they jump books)? Or will they condense the time period jumps and different characters into one long story involving the same characters?
Not only that, but many HBO shows are available via Amazon VOD. It looks like it is one season behind (in the case of Game of Thrones, at least), but you could still catch up with the Foundation series without subscribing to HBO/Cable TV.
I somehow worry less about them butchering the story with it as a HBO series than I would were they going to turn it into a movie (or even a series of movies). In the latter case, Michael Bay would probably get hired to direct, Hari Seldon would turn into a buff action star out to save the galaxy along with his scantily clad female assistant, and things would explode (utilizing the latest in CGI explosion technology) just by people looking at them.
So you've got servers hosting potentially sensitive data. Ordinarily, physical access to these boxes would be restricted to the people with data center access. Now will it be RANDOM_OFFICE_WORKER in RANDOM_COMPANY? Sure, you might have the servers password protected, but physical access to the boxes trumps nearly any other kind of security. This sounds to me like it is just a matter of time before some kind of massive data leak occurs thanks to hosting the servers outside of a secured data center.
There are two ways to censor the Internet:
1) The government imposes a "Don't Talk About X" order and punishes everyone who talks about X. This method is popular in places like China.
2) A small group of people on the Internet decide "We don't want anyone talking about X" and threatens/harasses anyone who talks about X. This leads to people either not talking about X or being forced offline due to the threats.
Right now, many people are experiencing censorship type #2. Note: This doesn't mean you can't disagree with someone online. Saying "I disagree with you and here is why..." is a lot different than saying "So-And-So is a **** and should be killed. They live at $FULL_ADDRESS." The former lays out your reasons for disagreeing. The latter is simply a threat of violence for daring to disagree. If you don't agree with the people who are being threatened, go ahead and state your reasons why. But don't think it is your right to threaten someone with violence. (Yes, I saw someone post that it was their right to threaten someone with death for disagreeing with them.)
As far as this being the work of "trolls", classic trolls would post something inflammatory and then would sit back and watch the firestorm erupt. A troll in Slashdot might post "Windows is better than Linux in every way" and wait for the Linux fans to respond. These people aren't engaging in "classic trolling" but in a new form of trolling which is better termed as simply harassment. They will follow people from site to site and will threaten to move the harassment from online to real life. (Showing up at conferences, calling the person, or posting the person's home address and threatening to go there.) These people shouldn't just be written off as harmless trolls, but should be treated as people engaging in criminal harassment.
My wife has experienced this too. Especially when it comes to repairmen talking to her like she's an idiot that doesn't understand anything or doesn't know when she's being served a heaping portion of BS. Then, I walk in the room and they suddenly act friendly and helpful as if I understand everything about car repair or air conditioning systems all instinctively due to the presence of my Y chromosome.
Luckily, I think she has escaped the most demeaning aspects of sexism (catcalling and other explicit sexual references), but she shouldn't be treated as if she is "less than" me just because I'm a man and she's a woman.
I take it personally when a woman is attacked by a man just for being a woman - but not because I want to claim it's an isolated case or because I want to try claiming "men have it worse." Simply put: I've spent my entire life being a nice guy. It's just not in my nature to be mean. If I'm unintentionally mean to someone, I'll feel horrible about it for weeks (if not longer). Now here comes some low-life poor-excuse-for-a-man who is tarnishing my entire gender simply because they can't keep their misogyny to themselves.
So beyond the obvious "don't like seeing anyone being harassed just for speaking their mind", I take offense because people like this ruin my reputation as a man just because they happen to be of the same gender.
I thought they needed to submit it to the Elders of the Internet. They can be reached in their offices atop Big Ben where they currently guard The Internet. (No, they won't lend it out to you. The last time they did that, it didn't work out so well.)
Exactly. There's a lot that people have the ability to do every day though they refrain from doing so. You could walk down the street and just decide to punch everyone in the nose. That's within your ability, but most people don't do this. (Mainly because they would get in trouble for doing so and/or would encounter someone who would punch back.) You also have the ability to walk down the street handing $1 bills to everyone you meet. Again, most people don't do this (as you might quickly run out of money to give out). Sadly, too many people confuse "can do X" with "it is my right to do X."
I had a few teachers like this. Unfortunately, my kids' school system seems to be geared towards giving teachers scripts that they NEED to follow (thanks, EngageNY!) and any deviation will be punished. Punishment is via standardized testing tied to teacher jobs. If the kids don't do well, the teacher is punished. This all but forces the teacher to devote all possible time on test preparation. Furthermore, kids who get the right answer, but not via the required method, are marked as wrong. The message to kids: Get in that box and stay in there. No wandering out for anything!
(Sadly, we can't afford private school so we're fighting against this system as much as we can while helping out kids break out of the box in other ways. Need to keep their creative intelligence alive somehow.)
I think the main difference is this:
In our day when we did a stupid thing, only a small group of people knew about it.
Today, when a kid does a stupid thing, a photo/video/post/etc can be shared with the world showing people all over the planet just how stupid this kid was.
Does everyone in the world care what stupid thing RANDOM_KID does? Of course not, but the fact that the Internet spreads this out there so widely can make what normally would have been a "your friends joke about it for a week" incident into total strangers commenting on how dumb you are.
(Sadly, many kids don't know one rule I learned that made me much happier: Take all positive comments you can from anyone, but only take negative comments from a trusted group of people [friends, family, co-workers, etc]. Ignore all other negative comments.)
Same here. I remember trying to get my first job in high school. I went for the interview and didn't have a resume or anything. I was accepted right away. All I needed to do was buy a couple hundred dollars worth of knives and then go door-to-door selling them. The guy who was jumping to hire me all but promised that I'd make tons of money. My parents refused to allow me to take the job and I remember at the time yelling about how unfair they were and how they didn't know anything. Now, I look back and cringe about how naive young-me was and am thankful that my parents were protecting enough to not have me spend hundreds of dollars (that I likely didn't have) on a "job" that would have just fleeced me for what little I was worth.
Others have countered more of your points, but I just wanted to address this one:
The Internet in general wasn't formed with video delivery in mind. Does this mean that nobody should ever distribute video over the Internet and expect it to work? Of course not. Times change and the use case for the Internet - and residential broadband networks - change as well. Most of the problems with distributing videos across residential networks seem to be caused by the ISPs who don't want to invest in infrastructure improvements, but want to keep taking users' money. Add in that these ISPs are usually monopolies/duopolies and the market can't "fix" this situation.
There are actually two problems at play here - with one common reason. The first is that the backbone ISPs are purposefully allowing their peering connections to saturate to hurt video companies like Netflix. The second is that last mile ISPs want to charge certain companies (e.g. video companies like Netflix) extra for the "privilege" of not having their packet delivery slowed to a crawl.
The reason for both of these is that these ISPs also - for the most part - offer cable TV services. They don't want upstarts like Netflix taking money away from their cable TV revenue so they are trying every trick they can to prevent people from using Netflix. (This includes setting bandwidth caps and charging overage fees.) Given that these ISPs also tend to be monopolies (or duopolies) in their areas, these actions *should* result in anti-trust investigations. Unfortunately, enough lobbying money has been spread around to keep anti-trust proceedings from starting.
Sadly, I've known people like this. They confuse what they want to do with what God wants them to do. So if they want to harass someone, it is God's will. If they want to pry into someone's personal life, it is really God's will that they do so. Everything they do is God's will and since God's will can't be questioned, they can't be questioned.
Why couldn't you have some sort of random audit the way restaurants are subject to random health inspections?
The stripper inspector arrives, flashes his badge, immediately sees all of the girls performing that night - double-checking to make sure they are of age - and perhaps makes sure other requirements are in order (e.g. liquor license is up to date, nothing illegal going on in the back rooms if you slip the girls some extra cash, etc).
Would this be a 100% effective solution to underage dancers? Of course not. But neither are health inspections a 100% effective means of keeping restaurants clean. You'll still get eateries where the chefs use the restroom and then walk out without washing their hands. It would be less prone to abuse, though, than a centrally located licensing facility with records that could be opened via an information request.
As an added bonus, imagine the line of candidates that would form for the position of Official Stripper Inspector.
Copyright originated as a balance between the needs of the creator (at the time, usually a writer) to have a monopoly on their work so as to make money from said work (and not have random publishers spitting out knock off copies without compensating the author) and the needs of the public to build on the works.
Patents came to be out of a desire to build upon others' works. The alternative to patents are trade secrets and, at one time, every industry was run by a guild that viciously protected their secrets. If you wanted to break into that industry (or build on what they were doing), you needed to know these secrets and you couldn't know that unless the guild allowed you to know. With patents, companies could "own" a technique/technology for a limited time in exchange for the knowledge being made public and being freely available when the patent expired.
The abuse of copyrights was primarily due to their length. In the original form at the time of the USA's founding, copyright length was 14 years plus a one-time 14 year renewal. Nowadays, they can be 120 years long. Patents, meanwhile, were abused by being applied to anything and everything. Performing a common task but with a computer? Patent it. Add in a patent office with a "approve it all and let the courts sort it out" combined with courts with a "if the patent office approved it, assume it is valid", and it is easy to see why this was messed up.